The Glass Hotel

While in Portland I bought Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, which I read immediately and enjoyed immensely. At the same time I bought another of her novels, The Glass Hotel, which I saved for later. But with great new authors, later always comes sooner than I expect, so when the weather turned grey I turned towards her fifth novel.

Now Station Eleven is set in a post-apocalyptic dystopian future, but The Glass Hotel stays closer to home. We meet a couple of characters, who all at some point find themselves in the same hotel (mostly made of glass) on Vancouver Island. Afterwards they go their separate ways, but their lives remain interconnected less obviously but tied in nicely towards the end of the story.

Now apparently Barack Obama included the novel in one of his recommended reading lists, so it must strike a chord with some people, but it sadly left me a bit underwhelmed. I liked most of the characters, but I couldn't really sympathise with them. Some of them disppeared for long stretches of the novel, which made it unclear who exactly were the main characters. Also, most of them don't get a happy ending, but I wasn't particularly interested in their fates. 

Apart from the characers, the language and writing style were good, but the themes and subjects just didn't really grip me. Two searching millenials, trying to achieve something but at the same time trying to hold each other back doesn't make for happy reading. The most enjoyable part was the collapse of the business of one of the other characters, which is probably not supposed to be the high point of the novel.

I read somewhere that St. John Mandel is working towards an inclusive universe, where all her novels are interconnected and characters can be found in several places, like David Mitchell does in his works. In this novel, the Georgian Flu that wipes out most of the population in Station Eleven is quickly quenced, and we meet a couple of characters from that novel in more detail. However, they didn't strike me as the most interesting characters then, and they weren't that special here. It is a nice touch, but it doesn't give you the surprise element that often happens in David Mitchell novels, where you meet the grandson or best friend of a character from an earlier novel, and a throwaway remark suddenly brings the two together. Here, it was more on the nose, which clashes with her otherwise pretty subtle style.

So all in all, it left me underwhelmed. It is always hard to follow-up on a very good novel, as the recent example of Sally Rooney also proved, so maybe my expectations were just too high. Luckily, St. John Mandel already has a new novel out. The only annoying thing is that I now have these two novels in a specific edition and want to buy all her other novels in the same edition. Which are nowhere to be found. I may have to travel back to the US, possibly even Portland, to locate the right versions...